The cybercrime marketplace is booming, and it’s running at a scale that’s hard to ignore. Today, ransomware-as-a-service, stolen credentials, and even ready-made phishing kits are just a click away on the dark web. Cybercrime has transformed into a well-oiled business ecosystem, with cybercriminals collaborating, innovating, and trading tools like any legitimate industry.
The numbers tell the story: global cybercrime costs are projected to hit $10.5 trillion annually this year1. What’s worse, cybercriminals are becoming increasingly creative, using artificial intelligence, automation, and social engineering tactics to outpace traditional defenses.
For businesses, this means the threat landscape is not just growing, it’s evolving rapidly. Attackers are targeting everything from small vulnerabilities to large-scale supply chains. The reality is clear: static defenses won’t cut it anymore. The only way to survive, and thrive, is by building cyber resilience into your operations.
What Is Cyber Resilience?
At its core, cyber resilience is your organization’s ability to:
- Anticipate potential cyber threats
- Withstand attacks or disruptions
- Recover quickly and minimize downtime
- Adapt to new challenges as they arise
For business leaders, resilience ensures continuity in the face of disruption. For practitioners, it’s about having the right tools, processes, and mindset to combat evolving threats effectively. It’s the ultimate combination of preparedness, adaptability, and proactive action.
Let’s break down what cyber resilience is and how you can build it into your security strategy for 2025.
The Key Components of Cyber Resilience
Building resilience requires a strategic approach. Here are the critical components every organization should focus on:
Comprehensive Risk Assessment
The first step to improved cyber resilience is understanding your unique risk landscape. While many organizations are aware of some cyber risks, they often don’t have a deep understanding of the severity or potential impact or know the appropriate mitigating steps to take to resolve them.
Not all risk assessments are the same. To find the right one for your organization, it is important to first understand your goals. Questions to ask include:
- Does your organization adhere to a specific cyber framework?
- Are you looking for a self-guided questionnaire, or do you want an independent evaluation?
- Do you have specific regulatory or compliance requirements to consider?
- What is your budget for assessment?
- Do you want to validate control effectiveness as part of the assessment?
- How experienced is the cyber firm conducting the assessment, and do they have actual experience resolving identified risks?
- Have you seen a sample report, and does it provide actionable guidance?
An independent risk assessment measured against cybersecurity frameworks can help identify and prioritize risks, giving your organization a well-defined roadmap for improvements. Because cyber threats continue to evolve, it is necessary to conduct these exercises regularly to find potential gaps and prioritize your defenses where they’re needed most. This process isn’t just about finding risks, it’s about understanding the impact those risks could have on your business operations and even how they may affect insurance coverage.
This section was co-written in collaboration with Jenifer White Visek, Vice President of Investment and Portfolio Protection at Aon.
Continuous Monitoring and Threat Detection
Cyber threats don’t work a 9-to-5 schedule. Continuous monitoring is the cornerstone of a resilient cybersecurity strategy, allowing you to detect and respond to suspicious activity in real time.
To truly enhance your monitoring efforts, consider partnering with Managed Detection and Response (MDR) providers. These services bring 24/7 expertise, advanced tools, and threat-informed detection strategies tailored to your industry and specific risk profile. MDR providers don’t just monitor, they actively analyze and respond to threats, ensuring potential issues are addressed before they escalate.
For an even more robust approach, look to augment your defenses with threat hunting capabilities. This proactive practice involves skilled analysts searching for hidden or emerging risks that automated systems may miss, further strengthening your ability to uncover and neutralize advanced threats.
By combining continuous monitoring with MDR services and proactive threat hunting, your organization can stay ahead of attackers, using expertise and strategies informed by your unique risk landscape and industry trends. This partnership approach not only enhances detection but also empowers your team to focus on strategic priorities while maintaining comprehensive security coverage.
Incident Response Planning
No matter how strong your defenses are, breaches can still happen. That’s why having an incident response (IR) plan is non-negotiable.
An effective IR plan should include:
- A clear chain of command for who does what during an incident
- Step-by-step instructions for isolating, mitigating, and recovering from attacks
- Coordination and communication
- Post incident activity and lessons learned
- Regular simulations and drills to ensure your team is prepared
Incident response planning isn’t just about damage control, it’s about minimizing downtime and maintaining customer trust during challenging times.
There are many great resources that are available to drafting an IR plan such as NIST 800-61, which represent an overall framework for an organization to handle a cyber incident ; from detection to analysis to containment and eradication, through post incident handling. The most effective plans are those that align with the organization’s technologies, organizational structure, existing escalation chains, and current incident response capabilities.
Incident response planning also consists of conducting cyber threat exercises (CTE). A CTE is designed to test the understanding of an organization’s key stakeholders on their roles and responsibilities during an incident as well as the effectiveness of the Incident Response plan, playbooks, and other processes. Cyber threat exercises simulate a specific attack or cybersecurity incident relevant to an organization and their industry vertical. Participants can include technical/operations stakeholders, middle management, executives, board of directors, or a combination of those listed, following along the intended scenario path with various opportunities for discussion and collaboration.
The cyber threat exercise provides an opportunity for participants to consider essential internal and outward-facing elements of incident response and can provide an open forum for participants to explore opportunities for improvement of the organization’s strategies, policies, and procedures. The focus of the CTE is to exercise the organization’s incident response readiness and practice the necessary coordination that takes place with internal and external stakeholders. Additionally, the CTE intends to improve the organization’s overall cybersecurity posture and collective decision-making processes of those participating. It is designed to be an open, thought-provoking exchange of ideas to help develop and expand existing knowledge of policies and procedures within the framework of cybersecurity incident response. The CTE emphasizes cybersecurity and physical response coordination, resource integration, and crisis management.
This section was co-written in collaboration with Che Bhatia, Managing Director at Aon.
Digital Risk Protection
In today’s digital-first world, your organization’s reputation is often your most valuable asset. Unfortunately, it’s also a prime target for cybercriminals.
Digital Risk Protection (DRP) focuses on safeguarding your brand and assets across online channels like social media, the dark web, and other platforms. With DRP, you can monitor for threats like:
- Stolen credentials being sold online
- Impersonation attempts targeting your customers
- Leaked sensitive information
Being proactive in protecting your digital presence can prevent small issues from turning into big problems.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Cyber resilience isn’t just about security, it’s about ensuring your business can keep operating during disruptions. Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) planning involves identifying and mapping your organization’s critical business processes to the assets and applications that support them. This evaluation enables an organization to better prioritize resources and develop strategies to minimize downtime, which is essential when setting recovery objectives including:
- Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) – What is the maximum duration a system or application can be down before facing catastrophic consequences?
- Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) – How much data can the organization stand to lose?
Business and IT stakeholders should actively participate in BC/DR planning since IT infrastructure and applications need to be designed to meet your recovery objectives. A strong BC/DR program includes:
- A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to identify critical processes and supporting infrastructure.
- Defined roles and responsibilities for planning, plan activation, and restoration.
- Regular backups taken at a frequency to support the defined RPO and stored in an offsite, immutable location to safeguard against cyber threats.
- System redundancies, either on-prem or in the cloud, to support recovery should the primary environment be impacted.
- Communication plans to keep your team and stakeholders informed.
Modern BC/DR plans should complement a robust Cybersecurity Incident Response Plan addressing the complexities of recovery following a cyber incident. Key considerations should be addressed in BC/DR planning, including:
- When is it safe to initiate recovery?
- Will you need to recover before incident containment and eradication is complete?
- How long has the threat actor been in the environment, and how does this affect which backups are safe to restore?
- Can lost data be rebuilt if older backup images are used?
- Are contingency processes in place to support the business during extended outages?
The complexity of today’s cyber threat landscape means the likelihood that your organization will be impacted by an event requiring business continuity practices to be implemented is higher than ever. Prepare for these events by regularly testing your BC and DR plans using various approaches, including through tabletop simulations and functional recovery exercises.
Organizations face numerous operational challenges, and cyber threats are just one of them. A well-structured BC and DR program provides a strong foundation for resilience, ensuring that disruptions, whether from cyber incidents, natural disasters, or operational failures, don’t impede critical business processes beyond an acceptable threshold.
This section was co-written in collaboration with Dan McConomy, Manager – Advisory Services at Aon
Continuous Learning and Adaptation
The cyber threat landscape is always changing. To stay resilient, your defenses need to evolve just as quickly.
Regularly update your security policies, tools, and practices based on:
- New threat intelligence
- Lessons learned from past incidents
- Industry best practices
Encourage your teams to view security as a learning process, one that gets stronger with every challenge faced.
Why Cyber Resilience Matters
Investing in cyber resilience is more than just a defensive move; it’s a strategic advantage. Here’s why it pays off:
- Minimized Downtime and Financial Losses
Resilience helps you recover faster, reducing the financial and reputational damage caused by disruptions.
- Stronger Regulatory Compliance
Many frameworks (like GDPR and HIPAA) require robust security measures. Resilience ensures you’re always audit-ready.
- Improved Stakeholder Confidence
Customers, partners, and employees are more likely to trust an organization that takes security seriously.
The Path Forward
Cyber resilience isn’t just a checkbox or a buzzword, it’s a strategic mindset and an organizational belief. It’s about embedding the principles of preparedness, adaptability, and recovery into the very fabric of your operations. In a world where cybercrime continues to scale and attackers grow more sophisticated, resilience must be more than a response, it must be a guiding philosophy.
This mindset starts with understanding your risks and vulnerabilities. Revisit your incident response plan, prioritize continuous monitoring, and align your security strategies with your organization’s unique goals and challenges. Think beyond tools and technologies, focus on creating a culture where resilience is everyone’s responsibility.
In 2025, resilience is about more than surviving cyber threats. It’s about ensuring your organization is positioned to adapt, recover, and come back stronger after every challenge. By fostering this belief, you’re not just mitigating risk, you’re building a competitive advantage that empowers your business to thrive in an unpredictable world.
Make resilience not just a plan, but your organization’s foundation for growth and success.
Sources:
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/01/global-rules-crack-down-cybercrime